Bitcoin Has Arrived in Vegas, But It's Still Far From Mainstream

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Bitcoin Has Arrived in Vegas, But It's Still Far From Mainstream

The Golden Gate Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas is now accepting payments in bitcoin.

Image: Leila Navidi, LV Sun/AP

In 1906, it installed the first Las Vegas telephone. In 1959, it served the first Las Vegas shrimp cocktail. And now, the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino is pushing Las Vegas into yet another brave new world: bitcoin.

The Golden Gate and its sister casino, The D Las Vegas, are now accepting payments in the increasingly popular digital currency. It's one more milestone for bitcoin, which has also reached its first major online retailer and its first pro sports team. But there's a catch. The two Vegas hotels are not yet accepting the digital currency on the casino floor, only at their front desks and inside hotel restaurants and gift shops.

>'Once we have more from our government, we might be able to implement bitcoin for casino gaming, but I think we're still a ways away from that'

Derek Stevens

This measured approach shows that while bitcoin is rapidly spreading its tentacles across the globe, there are many places where its growth is restricted by government regulation – or just the fear of government regulation. Derek Stevens, the co-owner of the D and the Golden Gate, tells us that he and his company stopped short of accepting bitcoin on the casino floor due to uncertainty over how the government will treat the digital currency.

"We need to have greater clarity from the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Justice, the IRS," Stevens says. "Once we have more from our government, we might be able to implement bitcoin for casino gaming, but I think we're still a ways away from that."

Stevens says he has spoken to Nevada's Gaming Control Board about digital currency, but even the board, he says, is unsure about how the feds will view the use of bitcoin inside real-world gambling houses. So, as of today, you can use bitcoin to pay for a room or a dinner or a T-shirt at the Golden Gate, holding your phone's bitcoin wallet up to tablets set up inside the hotel, but you can't swap your bitcoins for casino chips.

The good news is that things are moving in the right direction. This past fall, multiple financial regulators seemed to give bitcoin their stamp of approval during hearings on Capitol Hill. "Seven or eight months ago, I was really worried. But now I'm not. There has been a clear progression in the U.S.," says Fred Ehrsam, who co-founded a bitcoin payment processor called Coinbase. "The Senate hearings were almost comically positive.

Exchanges and payment processors like Coinbase, Ehram says, can satisfy government regulators merely by registering with federal and state officials as money transmitters. But other operations – such as, say, bitcoin derivatives markets or bitcoin casinos – are venturing into uncharted territory.

Though the Golden Gate is treading lightly into world of bitcoin, it's telling that the hotel is moving at all. This is the oldest casino in Las Vegas, but according to Stevens, it is being pushed into the future by Tony Hsieh's Zappos and other free-thinking startups that have set up shop in the area. "Zappos is only a block away from us," he says. "People started asking me: 'Do you accept bitcoin?'"